Dear New Covenant Friends, Last week I had the privilege of hearing from a leader as she told the story of Elijah in I Kings. She explained how the brave widow chose to entrust her remaining earthly sustenance to a stranger at the risk of starving her son. Elijah’s prayerful obedience, coupled with the widow’s generosity, unveil an out of the box missions scenario that has given me much cause for reflection this week. What is the face of global missions in 2016?

Our journey through Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with our confession that things have not gone as they should. Maybe things didn’t go as we planned, or maybe our plans didn’t turn out as we imagined. “We have not loved God with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” With the wreckage of these missed marks before us, the confession leads us to make a turn, a course correction, and go in a new direction. “We are truly sorry, and we humbly repent.” The scriptures this Sunday ask us to consider what we will do now. What comes after the confession that our internal GPS failed us, and that we have failed God and those around us?

It may seem a bit early to talk about Valentine’s Day, despite the fact that many retail stores have had cards and candy out since just before the glow of the Christmas lights faded. To be honest, this epistle is about love, not the “special day” that greeting card companies and chocolatiers claim as the holiday of love. When we are young, it is a flashy, fun and frivolous day of romance, if we are lucky. As we grow older and hopefully more mature, love begins to grow in dimension. Romance is still wonderful and much-needed, but real relationship suddenly transforms any one-dimensional perspective of love into something that defies easy explanation, something that must be experienced rather than defined.

“This life is sort of like a test for the next, preparation. How we live here matters.” That was my mother’s answer to a question, which I don’t recall as well as her response, that I asked her almost 6 decades ago. It must have had to do with the meaning of life. What else does a nine-year-old ask his parents? After all too much time and theological education, I like her answer, yet I am still pondering what we can do that prepares us for eternal life.

Wedding photographers have an amazing task. They document both actions and feelings of a day in which multiple people with multiple tasks move around one another simultaneously with a single goal in mind. “I do”, say the happy couple. Click. Or, click, click, click, click, click, click. Click. Careful planning surely attends the planning of the photographer’s task list, as the images that every future bride and groom have seen in a movie’s happy ending or a bridal magazine are catalogued and sequenced.

Some neighborhoods are extraordinary at Christmas. Inside and out, homes and hearths mark the days leading up to Christmas. Some neighbors have more holiday light ambitions than the Home Owners Association ever anticipated. I embrace (and defend) the gaudier side of Christmas. I am (mostly) convinced that the incarnation of the Christ in great humility plausibly implies that we may welcome the use of plastic and tinsel in our preparations to celebrate the Feast of His birth.

This Sunday, the third of Advent, is called “Gaudete” Sunday. It’s the Latin word from the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible, for the opening of the reading from Philippians, Rejoice: And as we light the third Advent candle we pray:

It’s always dangerous to share a New Year’s resolution, and to share one before the new year has officially begun is even more so. Nonetheless, this Sunday, which we designate as Christ the King, is the last Sunday in the church year, and the next is the beginning of Advent, the first Sunday of the new liturgical year. Risking all, in light Jesus’ kingship and the move of Advent toward the Incarnation, here’s my resolution and invitation. I want to be a Kingsman. And I want to invite each of you to be a Kingsman or Kingswoman as well. I’ll explain.

This 24th Sunday after Pentecost brings to us readings that exalt values attributed to the biblical understanding of a widow. I got quite fascinated by a comparative reading of the selected texts that allude to the word "widow". I asked myself, "What if we all could be widows in the eyes of our God, who is the author and owner of all possessions!"

Charles M. Irish 7/13/29 - 10/12/15 "My dad, whose life you all have come here tonight to celebrate, and in some way must have touched your lives, was just an ordinary guy. Like you and me. And he would say that if he was here. He just pushed ahead with whatever God gave him or put in front of him. He was bold like that." Sounded to me a bit like bold Bartimaeus in Sunday's gospel reading. “I want to see!”